Create and manipulate fonts using JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Create and manipulate fonts using JavaScript

pluminjs.com

88 pointspotomak12 comments

Plumin is a light wrapper around paper.js [1] and my opentype.js library[2], which can parse and write OpenType fonts in pure JavaScript.

Plumin is nice to build fonts from scratch. If you're interested in taking an existing font and manipulating its shape or metrics, consider using opentype.js directly.

[1] http://paperjs.org/

[2] https://github.com/nodebox/opentype.js

What is the use case for something like this? I think it's really, really cool that this is possible, but I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario in which I'd actually want to do this.

I know of at least one site (FilmOn) that uses this kind of font substitution for rendering UI elements.

Is that done on the client-side or on the server? It makes sense to me if you want to programmatically generate icon fonts, but I just don't see the use case for doing this in the browser. Unless of course you were building an in-browser font creator tool. :)

Regardless, this is a really cool idea!

A SaaS could use it to distort content, and remove the distortion for paid accounts.

by distorting on client side? well..

Just being able to adjust the font-weight of a font that doesn't have multiple font-weights is something I've wanted to do many times before.

Maybe something like what this guy was trying to do[1].

[1] https://github.com/christopherwoodall/fontface-Captcha

Here is the introduction blog post: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/599698621/prototypo-str...

Web Font licensing is such a completely painful mess that I would wish/hope/love if this software came with a license that constrains the terms of use on any fonts produced with it to Creative Commons, or (what the hell) GPL.

Looks pretty awesome. Do you have any benchmarks on how fast this is on a mobile?

Blob url's set for @font-face src! What a neat hack.

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